“More or less.”

“That’s why you’re all dressed up. You’re having lunch with Borden Stoppelgard, aren’t you?”

“No, but you’re close.”

“I’m close? I don’t know what that means. Who’s close to Borden Stoppelgard?”

“Nobody who can help it.”

“But—”

“I’d better get going,” I said. “I don’t want to keep Marty waiting.”

“Marty? Marty Gilmartin?”

“At his club,” I said. “Pretty fancy, huh? I’ll tell you all about it.”

The Pretenders have as their clubhouse a five-story Greek Revival mansion facing Gramercy Park. I walked up Irving Place and arrived no more than three minutes late for my one o’clock lunch date. I gave my name to the liveried attendant at the desk and he informed me that Mr. Gilmartin was awaiting me in the lounge.

I walked down a half flight of carpeted stairs and into a cozy wood-paneled room with a bar at one end and a pool table at the other. Two men stood, cues in hand, while a third took aim at a shot that didn’t look terribly promising. Several stood at the bar, and eight or ten others were grouped in twos and threes at dark wooden tables. They were all over thirty-five, they all wore jackets and ties, and one of them was Martin Gilmartin.

Truth to tell, he wasn’t terribly hard to find. He was seated by himself with a newspaper and a drink, and he looked up with interest when I entered the room. I approached him and said, “Mr. Gilmartin?” and he got to his feet and said, “Mr. Rhodenbarr?” and we shook hands. I apologized for my late arrival and he assured me that was nonsense, I wasn’t late at all. He was an elegant man, tall and slender and silver-haired, splendidly turned out in a tan suit, a deep blue shirt with a contrasting white collar, and a light blue tie. His shoes were cap toes, and looked remarkably like the pair I’d worn home from Harlan Nugent’s the previous morning, although those had been black. Gilmartin’s were a rich walnut brown.

“I’m awfully sorry,” he said. “I told you that you’d need a jacket here, but I didn’t think to mention we’re stuffy enough to require a tie as well. I see they made you put on one of those horrors they’ve got hanging in the cloakroom.”

“Actually, it’s my own tie.”

“And a very nice one, too,” he said smoothly. “We could eat down here, but it’s quieter and a bit more private upstairs in the dining room. Does that sound all right to you?”

I said it was fine and he led me up the stairs and down a hallway to the dining room, pointing out various objects of interest along the way. The ceilings were high, the floors deeply carpeted, and the furniture ran to a lot of dark wood and red leather. The walls were thickly hung with portraits, all of them elaborately framed and almost all of them of actors and actresses.

“Notice the two portraits on either side of the fireplace,” he said. “They’re in matching frames, although they’re the work of two different artists. I don’t suppose you recognize the subjects?” I didn’t. “We refer to them affectionately as the honorary founders of the club. The chap on the left is James Stuart, and on the right we have his son, Charles Stuart. You may remember him as Bonnie Prince Charlie.”

“Pretenders to the English throne.”

“Very good. James called himself James III, but history has called him the Old Pretender, and his son the Young Pretender. And so, although the Stuarts are not actors, they seem unquestionably qualified to be of our company. With a single exception, all the other portraits depict members of the Profession.”

“Who’s the other nonactor?”

“There are four of them, actually, but they’re together in the painting. You may have noticed it as you came in, hanging right opposite the cloakroom.”

“The four young black men standing around a microphone.”

“I don’t believe any of them ever trod the boards,” he said, “although they’d have been eligible for membership here in that they were unquestionably show-business professionals. They called themselves the Platters, and one of their biggest hits was a song called ‘The Great Pretender.’ ” He smiled, shook out his napkin, and placed it upon his lap. “Well,” he said, “what will you have to drink? And then we probably ought to have a look at the menu.”

We had a remarkably civilized conversation through drinks and appetizers. When the waiter had served our entrees, a lull settled in. I thought we might get to the business at hand, but after a moment he began talking about a play he’d seen, and that carried us through to coffee. Then it was clearly time, and it was evidently up to me to begin.

“I’m sorry I called you at home this morning,” I said, “but I didn’t have your office number.”

“My home is my office,” he said, “although I have more than one telephone line. Here, let me give you a card.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Here, have one of mine.”

“Ah,” he said, taking it, turning it over in his hand. “Rabbit Maranville. From the Diamond Stars set of the mid-thirties. I can’t recall whether or not he’s in the Hall of Fame. Nor can I claim to have seen him play. I’m not quite old enough.”

“I was thinking you might recognize the card.”

He nodded. “The years haven’t dealt kindly with it, have they? I hope they were easier on the Rabbit himself. The card’s been folded, one corner’s completely gone, and well, it’s a mess, isn’t it?”

“It would be worth about two hundred dollars in near mint condition,” I said. “But in the shape it’s in—”

“No more than five or ten dollars. Assuming someone wanted such a poor specimen.” He handed it back, inhaled deeply, exhaled thoroughly. “How on earth did you get hold of this? But I suppose that’s a professional secret.”

“Sort of.”

He sipped his coffee. “Cash,” he said.

“You needed some.”

“I needed to get some without looking as though I needed it. I have a lot of assets, but none that I could convert to cash invisibly. If I sold paintings off the walls, the sale would be a matter of record and there’d be a blank spot on the wall where the painting had hung. If I sold real estate…well, in this market you have to give it away, and the only way to unload anything is to take back mortgages. I wouldn’t wind up with anything in the way of cash. And, as you’ve observed, I needed cash.”

“How much?”

“Ideally, a million dollars.”

I wondered what it would be like to need a million dollars. I knew people who wanted a million dollars, but that’s not the same thing.

I said, “So you thought of your baseball cards.”

“I’ve been collecting them for years. My occupation is buying and selling, you know. I began acquiring the cards as a hobby, something to take my mind off weightier matters. Can you believe I’ve had a higher annual return on them than on stocks or paintings? And don’t even mention commercial real estate.”

“I won’t.”

“But what’s truly remarkable about the cards,” he said, “is the ease with which they can be sold. You walk in with a box of cards, you walk out with a fistful of cash.”

“Like stamps or coins.”

“I would suppose so, although I think that cards are if anything a little more anonymous. I can tell you this much. In a matter of weeks, without anyone’s knowing what I was doing, I had liquidated virtually my entire holdings and raised close to six hundred thousand dollars.” He leaned forward. “I should emphasize that there was nothing the slightest bit illegal or immoral or unethical about what I had done. I owned those cards outright. I had bought them, and they were mine to sell.”

“And nobody had to know about it.”

“And no one did. My collection was housed in a rosewood humidor in my study. The cedar lining that once protected fine cigars from deteriorating is equally efficacious at preserving cardboard rectangles from insect damage. I kept the most valuable cards in acetate sleeves. The rest were loose.” He raised a hand, and a waiter hurried over to pour us more coffee. “I would take twenty or fifty or a hundred cards at a time from the box. After I’d sold them, I would stop at another card store and buy late-date commons to replace what I’d sold. Or earlier material in very poor condition, like that unfortunate Rabbit Maranville specimen you brought along.”